AntiMozdeBeast – The Alien Machine
AntiMozdeBeast – The Alien Machine
Self – Released
Release Date: 17/01/25
Running Time: 30:47
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
Greetings, dear friends around the world. I have been a bit busy recently because of my stupid work, and I apologise for not being in correspondence with you as often as I should have been.
However, because I am a massive spod and don’t like outside that much (there’s people out there and it generally isn’t centrally heated) I like to amuse myself when I am not writing exquisitely crafted reviews that probably not more than three people worldwide read with gluing little bits of plastic together, painting them until they vaguely resemble what’s on the box and sticking them on a shelf when they are finished and letting them gather dust there. This constitutes a hobby, although Mrs Dark Juan is of the opinion that the building of model kits and the acquiring of them are two completely different hobbies, seeing as I have many more waiting to be built than are currently completed. But I do like to ease you, good reader, gently into the stream-of-consciousness madness that passes for a record review in the somewhat outré mindscape of Dark Juan.
The Platter of Splatter ™ has been summoned.
The offering placed reverently upon it is from a project called AntiMozdeBeast, being the work of US musician/ butcher/ savage sonic murderer Gabriel Palacio (who I am sure is really a lovely, softly spoken person) and the album, “The Alien Machine”, being some Electronic Industrial music. Everyone who reads my shit knows that Industrial music is my passion!
Let us begin!
First things first, this is not so much an album as an endurance test. The music might be electronic but its fucking bludgeoning. Opening piece ‘Antigone’ is a nine-and-a-half-minute blast through the darker recesses of the imagination of Palacio, steamhammer-driven percussion and a repeated, alarm-like shriek driving the listener into a panic-soaked, foetal position craving bag of nerves. The sense of alienation and not-belonging is palpable. The misanthropy is shocking. It is human and not-human at the same time. The music (such as it is) is relentless, a rock-crushing machine chewing its way through boulders like they are cotton candy. The torture doesn’t stop – like being whipped by machines, skin slowly flaying off your tortured and cruelly abused flesh for a transgression that is being punished out of all proportion. Methodical, rhythmic and machine precise strokes laying open already tortured nerve endings as the machine sprays skin-dissolving solvents to make sure every last iota of pain is extracted from your abused flesh. Contrast this with ‘Sanctuary’ – a demented, horrifically medicated Jean-Michel Jarre being jabbed with electric cattle prods as he sits by his machinery, his torturers recording every spasmodic, electric-fuelled jerk on the keyboards as his limbs lock and he strikes the keys.
Jesus, this is a soundtrack to the worst kind of technological hell. AntiMozdeBeast delights in dragging his music to the very edge of listenability, frequently making it painful to listen to in places (‘War Dance’ is an absolutely and uncompromisingly insane, overly arpeggiated nightmare) and turning this album into something more than a listening experience and making it instead musical torture. It’s as if Throbbing Gristle were recording with MIDI and sequencers and samplers and shit instead of recording sound on 8-track tape and splicing them together.
And that’s the main thing I got from this album. Electronic Throbbing Gristle – AntiMozdeBeast shares that pioneering spirit, that absolute unwillingness to conform to any musical trope, that desire to make music from the noise and sounds of life around them, and run them through processors and flangers and flensers and turn them into something nightmarish, industrial slaughterhouses turned into perverse and unpleasant art, not where people rejoice in the mastery in front of them, but where they cower in abject fear as sound swells all around them in an every building crescendo of noise overlapping and building upon each other, to create an all-encompassing wall of noise which presses them all against the opposite wall and the locked and chained doors, screaming as one for escape. Then the sound (having taken on a vicious and capricious life of its own) starts to cut, fear turning to terror and pain. Welters of blood spill on the ground as the sound incorporates these items into itself, reflecting the screaming mass of puny humanity back at them as they cry and squeal and shriek and plead to a sound that has no humanity, there is only destruction within it. That and the desire to make these insignificant meat machines inoperative. The thunks and bangs of limbs being severed and falling on the floor are taken into the sound and reflected back at the humans in front of it in the form of a percussive shockwave that makes them tumble like dominoes, easier to catch and render non-functional…
Jesus fucking Christ. I need a lie down. Let me please tell you now that this is not a Metal album, although it is as alienated and misanthropic as the most primal of Black Metal. It is not polished, or pretty, or particularly technical. It is pulsating, endlessly pounding, massive steel hammers of loops and screaming, tortured electronics operating at ridiculous voltages one second before they catastrophically fail. The only smells are frying insulation, ozone and the coppery tang of old blood coating the machinery.
But the machinery is hysterically laughing.
Needless to say, because “The Alien Machine” is very challenging to listen to, and frankly some of the most out there Heavy Industrial I have heard in quite some time, I fucking love this album. It is so different, so out to lunch, so incredibly brutal.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System awards AntiMozdeBeast 9/10 for a record that will not find a massive audience, is not Metal although it shares much of the same feelings and intensity and is something that transcends music and turns it into the most exquisite pain and suffering. And that, my friends, is what makes it art. Discordant, horrific, ridiculously arpeggiated art.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Antigone
02. War Dance
03. Sanctuary
04. Poisoned
05. Ode Wise Dragon
LINE-UP:
Gabriel Palacio – Synth, guitar, vocals, production
LINKS:
